Soldier's Gap [Paperback]

Dave Schwinghammer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

When high school principal Jerry Egge sets out on his morning jog, he spots a red scrawl on the water tower, suggesting he go screw himself.

Fifteen minutes later, Jerry is dead, bludgeoned to death by a Louisville Slugger with a Wayne Terwilliger endorsement.

Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins arrives on the scene, suffering from a hangover. He's not all that thrilled about dealing with blood and a dead body.

But he hasn't seen anything yet. When he touches the band of Egge's baseball cap, he sees Egge's life pass before his eyes. He thinks he must be in shock.

Mingo Jones, the night deputy and a Mescalero Apache, wants to hold a ghost medicine ceremony for his former friend to insure that Egge is not caught between the Shadow World and the Land of Ever Summer.

Faced with more hoodoo than a kabbala scholar, the cynical Jenkins begins to track Egge's killer. The suspects are as legion as those in a William Peter Blatty novel. The superintendent of schools is romancing Egge's wife. One of Egge's students was expelled for bringing a gun to school and had been making threatening phone calls. A farmer, who is the closest thing to an eyewitness, has a son who's acting awfully guilty. And there's a beautiful young girl who confesses to having painted the obscenity on the tower.

Will the haunted Jenkins hunt down the killer, or will he, too, wind up trapped between the Shadow World and the Land of Ever Summer?

Editorial Reviews

Review

With its complex interplay of bizarre yet believable characters, Soldier's Gap falls somewhere between Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks. --Dave King, Writer's Digest columnist

About the Author

Dave Schwinghammer spent twenty years as a junior-senior high English-social studies teacher. He currently lives in Little Falls, Minnesota (home of Lindbergh), where he's working on a new novel: Honest Thief, Tender Murderer. It's about a guy who steals a bulldozer to impress his ex-wife.

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: iPublisher, Inc. (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158736039X
• ISBN-13: 978-1587360398
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,708,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strange happenings in a weird Minnesota, Town, December 31, 2001

By 

Carl Brookins (St. Paul, Minnesota, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Soldier's Gap (Paperback)

Little Falls, Minnesota, author Schwinghammer spent many years as an English and
Social Studies teacher in junior and senior high schools. It shows. Soldier's Gap is a
well-written, neatly organized work of crime fiction. It is complex, with a lot of
characters. They all live in and around a small town somewhere in Minnesota, but make
no mistake, this is most definitely not Lake Wobegon.

The town itself, Soldier's Gap, takes some getting used to. Most of the characters take
some getting used to. Everything is just a little bit out of whack here, especially the small
police force. Take Mingo, the night duty deputy. He's a Mescalaro Apache and he
sometimes dresses the part. On duty. He wants to hold a ghost medicine ceremony for
the deceased. The sheriff is way overweight, smokes, chews, and eats all the wrong
things. He's ripe for a heart attack or a recall petition very soon. The sheriff is sliding
into depression because important people in town are working to get the Deputy Sheriff,
Dave Jenkins, protagonist of this story, to run against him in the next election and the
mayor is extremely meddlesome. Jenkins is everything the Sheriff is not, plus he's sort of
going with volunteer fireperson, Annie, the Sheriff's daughter. Jenkins also has visions.

Dave Jenkins is very friendly with a teenager who appears to know more about everything
that's going on than anyone. There are a raft of other teenagers surging in and out of the
story, who interact with many of the adults in sometimes strange and mysterious ways. In
this book you'll get murder rustling, inter-cop-agency byplay, sex, teenaged angst,
alcoholism and drug use, and a flickering look at a different dimension. None of these
are fun topics, but the author is able to balance them with a particularly tongue-in-cheek
attitude, some outrageous activities and some snappy dialogue. Soldier's Gap is not a
town you'd want to live in, but it would be an interesting place to visit. The book is too
long but well-written, once you get comfortable with the characters.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Onion Worth Peeling, June 7, 2002

By 

Active Verb (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Soldier's Gap (Paperback)

I was glad when Jerry Egge was murdered at the end of the first chapter of The Soldiers Gap, because the guy was a whiny irritant. I was delighted to find out that he also irritated almost everyyone in his small, midwestern town - from his boss, who wanted to fire him; to his wife, who slept with his boss; to his children, who really weren't his.

Everyone, it seems, had a reason to want Jerry Egge dead. That makes a fun murder investigation, especially when the suspects are of the quirky Twin Peaks variety.

The book sets up its own unique world, and like any travels into an exotic location, it takes a while to get your bearings. A lot of the characters are quirky - in fact, almost everyone in this book is quirky - variety - from the teenage sexpots to the mystical Native American deputy.
It took me a while to get into the rhymth of the book and accept it on its own terms, but that's also the case of traveling to many foreign countries where I eventually had the time of my life.

The author is, his bio tells us, a long-time miswestern high school teacher, and he is adroit at capturing the smouldering undercurrents in an apparently placid small town. This ain't Mayberry and the head of the investigation ain't Andy Griffith (Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins arrives on the scene of the murder with a hangover). Jenkins, it is obvious from the start, has his own demons, and they become more apparent as the murder investigation goes along. In fact, solving the murder is only one of the many mysteries in this layered book. It's an onion well worth peeling.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Murder isn't usually this much fun, June 19, 2001

By 

"thisissokafkaesque" (Pittsburgh PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Soldier's Gap (Paperback)

If you're a fan of the Coen Brothers' vison of the Midwest, if you've enjoyed Pete Hautman's mysteries, if you like the snappy dailogue of Janet Evanovich, then you'll get a good read from Dave Schwinghammer. Dave Jenkins, a rough-around-the-edges deputy, finds himself baffled not only by the murders that keep happening in his town, but by a voice from beyond the grave that scares him as much as it seems to be trying to help him. He's getting to the bottom of this case, despite being bogged down by petty small-town politics, rampant juvenile delinquency, and trouble on the job that's a potent mixture of professional jealousy and the strain of finding himself at the apex of a love triangle with his boss's daughter and the high school crush he never quite stopped pining for. Soldier's Gap is a smorgasboard of a book, full of quirky yet entirely true-to-life characters that offers humor, mystery, suspense and romance. It's a fun read.